Lizzie shook her head. “Nope. It wasn’t for sale. But I brought my dad down to the shop anyway.” She had declined to tell him the photograph wasn’t available. “The shop was dark and cluttered, lots of velvet and mirrors. I brought him in, and he said, ‘This is what you want?’ and started muttering about Cindy Sherman knockoffs and the overweight girls and tired Appalachia narratives. But he kept staring at it. Finally he said to me, ‘I don’t like it, but I understand why you do.’ He turned to the saleswoman and asked the price. She told him it wasn’t for sale, that it was the owner’s. And my dad looked at her with a little smile and said, ‘Everything has its price.’ I remember him saying that so well. He wrote out his name and number and told her that the owner should call. And within a week, the photograph was hanging in my bedroom.”
Lizzie remembered feeling astounded by its arrival. How had he done it? What would it be like to never take no for an answer? Joseph paid whatever he paid for it, fought with whomever he fought with, on her behalf.
The embarrassment didn’t come until later, though it was the more lasting, saturated feeling, the one that stayed with her, blanketing the episode in her mind, the feeling that fueled her to take down the picture two years later while in college and never put it up again, the one that made this a story she rarely told. She did not want everything to have a price; that wasn’t the way she was going to live her life.
Rose stirred her iced tea, squeezed a tiny triangle of lemon. “That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,” she said. “He could be persuasive, your father.”
“I know. I shrugged off the gift.” Lizzie picked at a sliver of pale tomato; it was tasteless, a simulacrum of the real thing. “As if I expected it.” Her voice caught. Her sixteenth birthday. A lifetime ago; it didn’t matter anymore. But she wished more than anything that she could tell her father how much she appreciated all he did. “I was lucky,” she said now. “And I couldn’t see it.”
“You were a teenager.”
“I know, but I could be so nasty to him.” It was terrible to recall. Had Joseph thought of it as typical teenage behavior? Was he able to shrug it off? “I don’t even know what he spent on it. He shouldn’t have been spending money on something I didn’t need, especially then.”
“What do you mean?” Rose asked. “‘Then’?”
Lizzie paused. She hadn’t meant to say that; why had she said that? On the other hand, why should she be secretive about it with Rose now? “Just, that’s when he was having those problems with his practice. His office manager ripped him off. She was messing with the billing, big-time. She was charging patients the full amount, recording smaller amounts in the books, pocketing the difference. He didn’t discover it for months. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that he lost a lot of money over it, and that threw everything into a mess. He never liked the business side of things.” Lizzie picked at the remnants of her roll—chalky, stale.
“That’s terrible,” Rose said. “He never said a word to me. We weren’t such good friends, but still.”
“I don’t remember the exact timing. It might have been before you met him. He had stopped buying art then.” Lizzie felt herself edging close to the story that was so hard for her to tell. Here, with Rose, she didn’t want to stop. “My sister got sick not long after. The night the artwork was stolen, Sarah—”
“I know.”
Lizzie nodded, feeling her breath quicken. How much did Rose truly know?
The night of the party, Sarah had been antsy, waiting for a boy she called James P to arrive. James, at seventeen, was two years older than Sarah, a seemingly genial enough (or boring, Lizzie thought to herself) junior who went to a different high school but worked in the same darkroom as Sarah. When he gave her a ride home, she was euphoric for days. A conversation in which he mentioned another girl could send her into a tailspin for a week.
James eventually did show up—Lizzie caught a glimpse of her sister chatting with him in a large cluster—but when Lizzie went downstairs with Duncan, there was Sarah in a heap on the carpet, head down, arms around her knees. “Sarah?” she asked, exasperated. What was it this time?
Her sister lifted her head. She looked pale in the low light, her heavy mascara and liner raccooning her eyes. “I fucking hate him, I can’t believe how much I hate him.”
“Who?”
“James P. Who else? Did you see that girl he came with, the one with the red hair? That’s his girlfriend—his fucking girlfriend! How can he have a girlfriend? How can he do this to me?”
Lizzie got down on the thick creamy carpet and wrapped her arms around her sister. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Duncan hanging back. What would he think, seeing her mess of a sister? Lizzie tried to tug Sarah up. “You don’t know what’s going on between them; you don’t—”
“Her name is Charlie!” Sarah skirted back from Lizzie. “How ridiculous is that? Carlotta, really—a lame old lady’s name. She goes to Eastgate and she’s a swimmer and they spend their summers in Europe—”
“Shhh, it’s okay.” Lizzie saw the desperation etched so plainly on her sister’s face, and for a moment, she was afraid.
“No, it’s not! It’s most definitely not okay. James P told me all of this! He’s all impressed, he’s all, like, proud! I felt so stupid I wanted to die.”
“Look, maybe he didn’t know how you felt. Maybe he has no idea.”
“God, you don’t know; you really don’t know, do you?” Sarah was weeping now. “I just want to die.” She buried her face in her hands, her sobs loud, extravagant.
“Do you think she wants some water?” Duncan asked softly. “Maybe she’d feel better if she drank something.”
“No,” Sarah had said with disdain. “I do not”—beat, beat—“want something”—beat—“to drink.” She had glared at Duncan. “I want to talk to my sister, okay? I need to talk to my sister.”
“Hey,” Lizzie said. “He was just trying to help.”
“It’s okay,” Duncan said.
“No, it’s not.” She was not going to let Sarah fuck this up, not this time. “Just a second,” she said to her sister. And to Duncan: “Come.”
She led him down the hall as Sarah cried out: “Lizzie!”
“Just a sec!” Lizzie called back to her sister more sharply this time. “Wait for me,” she said to Duncan when they reached her room. She kissed him, determined that this moment, her moment, would not slip away.
When she returned, Sarah’s crying had slowed. “I’m so sorry, L,” she said, hiccuping the words out. Her face remained strained, her pupils enlarged, otherworldly. “I just—I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Lizzie was tired of all of it, her moods and neediness, her dark beauty and apologies. “You know what? Go to sleep. Or don’t. I don’t care.” Sarah would just take, take, take until there was nothing left of Lizzie. She was newly fifteen, two years older than Lizzie had been when their mother got sick, when Lizzie was heating up dinner for them both, her mother asking her to make sure that Sarah had snacks in her backpack for after school. She did not need a protector anymore.
Sarah’s face crumpled. “Lizzie . . .” She could barely get her name out, and covered her mouth with her hands. “Don’t say that.”
“No, I don’t want to hear it. I’m sick of this, okay? You’ll be fine in the morning.”